10H Sha of Pride questions

Hi guys! We are about to attempt sha on this friday. According to the information I found, I have a couple of questions. Wish you guys can help me with them.

1) Basics: heard most ppl 2 heal this fight, group stacks similar to normal but loosely. Is it correct?
2) About dispelling dots, some suggest just dispel regardless, 'cause damage is more problematic than pride. Is it true? Or still wait on healers getting Gift?
3) I heard mage greater invis can dispel without getting pride. Can someone confirm that? If it is the case, I would guess similar abilities may do the same thing. Can someone confirm if pally bubble/BoP, mage ice block (as well as druid symbiosis version), monk diffuse magic, lock w/e it is called, rogue cloak will work the same way?
4) How do you guys normally handling the thing on the ground that needs to be closed? Any efficient strategy?
5) What is group's pride generally at during the encounter?

1) Yes this is correct. You can do it with different strategies though, just be in range of your healers mostly.
2) Damage from one isn't too bad if you pop a raid cd for swelling pride. Double debuffs however need to be dispelled pre swelling pride or a big cooldown used.
3) I wouldn't think that greater invis, lock ability or diffuse magic do actually remove the debuff. They'll reduce the damage though (so use for swelling pride). The rest should work.
4) People with debuffs soak the rifts close to the losely stacked/spread group in order not to go out of healing range. People without debuff and tanks soak the other side of the boss. Make sure you're not away when banishment is incoming.
5) If stuff goes well it's about 75 during transition.

1) Yes this is correct. You can do it with different strategies though, just be in range of your healers mostly.
2) Damage from one isn't too bad if you pop a raid cd for swelling pride. Double debuffs however need to be dispelled pre swelling pride or a big cooldown used.
3) I wouldn't think that greater invis, lock ability or diffuse magic do actually remove the debuff. They'll reduce the damage though (so use for swelling pride). The rest should work.
4) People with debuffs soak the rifts close to the losely stacked/spread group in order not to go out of healing range. People without debuff and tanks soak the other side of the boss. Make sure you're not away when banishment is incoming.
5) If stuff goes well it's about 75 during transition.

From a healer PoV the dot is only dangerous if coupled with other things. Pride is actually not problematic unless you get 75 or more so you can definitely dispel some debuffs even if it gives you pride, just be prepared to deal with Projection if you do it a lot. The two times I generally do it is for people with prison + arrogance or instantly if people get two stacks of it.

...or before swelling pride if our shaman has it, he dies like ALL THE TIME

Stack loosely is preferred. Have a marker down behind the boss for people to collapse to when the buff goes out, get in and then get out. You don't need to be stacked to keep the buff. It is ideal however to have those 3 people stack back up several seconds before the buff wears out so it can get refreshed again. Loosely stacked also helps when adds spawn at 30 energy. Nothing is more frustrating then having adds spawning in all corners of the room because people are off doing their own thing.

As long as your raid isn't hitting 75 pride before the reset you're in a really good position.

The dot is the only really dangerous thing and it's only really dangerous if it gets multiple stacks on a single person, or if swelling pride is about to go out. None of which should be an issue because people should be using personals for every single swelling pride anyways. Our healers will dispel regardless of if they have the buff to prevent pride gain if they feel necessary. As said you have plenty of cushion to do so as long as your DPS doesn't take eternity to get him to 30%.

The rifts just need to constantly be closed. We just have people not close them around the time that swelling pride is going out. Theoretically as long as 8 are closed a minute you won't have any at all. You don't need to be perfect about it but people should be closing them after imprisonment, and after swelling pride goes out. As said you don't need to be perfect about it. It's fine to have 3-4 up at the 30% transition. Aside from the tanks we largely ignore them in the last phase unless it's completely safe.

Pop every CD on the first swelling pride after the 30% transition, it hits pretty hard and I am pretty sure it's the only one you're going to get unless your DPS is bad.

Warlocks can either dispel using the Imp and supremacy or with Sacifice. I know for sure Supremacy imp gives you pride, even if you have Gift of Titans, Unsure if you have the Sac ability if it still gives you pride or not. My healers call for me to self dispel if things get tight for them as this helps spread out the pride gain from dispels outside of titans buff.

Generally speaking, if Add dies quickly, is interrupted correctly, and you avoid the splash dmg of the rifts, your pride gain will have a lot of room. Additionally, as you get closer to 30% you can ramp up pride gain dispels as you are close to resetting pride anyways.

If you have a lock, have them setup their portal on one of the prison locks so they are always one global away from unlocking the poisoned person. They will need to drop a new portal mid fight, I usually do so after 3rd prison. Additionally, I put gateway between the back of the stack point to the furthest prison, so ranged who are poisoned can quickly get back to group and/or players can quickly port to the back of the room to soak rifts.

I would highly recommend watching the Vox guide for this fight, if ANYBODY fails pacman realms after that guide video.. they should be tared and feathered and sent to town square to be shamed. Vox mentioned ignoring the mechanic of having Gift of titans players close to dieing add to prevent raid wide pride gain and I agree, its not worth the hassle. If your raid can watch their feet and not gain pride from rifts, the raid wide pride gain will not push anybody over pre 30% pride reset.

Have your raid leader be very proactive about reminding people to soak rifts. Its easy to tunnel and its one of the most important aspects of the fight. Make sure all players have a Weak Aura or some other means of knowing when they can soak. We try to leave the close to stack point rifts for healers so they don't have to wander.

Has detailed descriptions of positioning and how to handle each boss mechanic, including the Pacman realm. All in text form.

Regarding the level of Pride you'll reach, if all mechanics are done properly no one should be over 50 by the time you hit phase 2, though you are more likely to be approaching the 75% mark without perfect play and there is obviously also your raid's DPS to factor in for that as well (longer in P1 = higher Pride!). P2 is more of the same, if you are too slow, you'll hit 100% and have to kill it before the 2nd Swelling Corruption in that phase. This week, we kill the boss shortly after the 1st Swelling Corruption in P2 went off.

You can three heal this fight fine. I dislike this trend to 2 heal everything on heroic. I run a Hpally,disc, MW monk. We essentially have 6 dps and 3 healers. Its much safer, especially with the sub 30% aoe damage. 2 healing this fight has a large margin of error sub 30%. The damage is insane and you risk losing people during swelling. Its obviously possible, but unless you are hitting enrage I see 0 reason to bring 2 healers to most fights.

From what I understand it you can close 10 rifts per 1m and 20 rifts per minute spawn.
As long as you do not hit 75 pride by 30% (or have a swelling with 75 pride) the amount of pride you have is a nonissue. Also the titan buff is nice if you can manage to stack for it, but isn't necessary for efficient kills.

With 3 healers you can afford to not dispell as much since you have the extra cushion of healing.
Don't dps the sha reflections. Have the tank not on the boss come pick them up and then tanks can cleave them down together. More veng/next to no damage on tanks, more dps on boss.

Everyone should be closing rifts as they can, but don't run super far to close them as to range healers, especially during banishment/reflection timers.

Swelling corruption isn't a problem if you've got a good rotation for it. The issue with 3 healing is the fact that it makes every other aspect of the fight (keeping ahead of timers and amount of pride) harder. Even sub 30% you should be fine until you start hitting 50-75% pride. At that point another healer adds very little.
The reason that it works well for you may be that you're using a disc and a MW which both can put out good dps.

On 10 man, you can close a maximum of 10 rifts per minute with 7.5, so 8 rifts per minute spawning, ideally you can close all of them, but problems such as tank debuff + other mechanics prevent you from closing all, but you should have at most 2-3 active in the first phase.

You can three heal this fight fine. I dislike this trend to 2 heal everything on heroic. I run a Hpally,disc, MW monk. We essentially have 6 dps and 3 healers. Its much safer, especially with the sub 30% aoe damage. 2 healing this fight has a large margin of error sub 30%. The damage is insane and you risk losing people during swelling. Its obviously possible, but unless you are hitting enrage I see 0 reason to bring 2 healers to most fights.

From what I understand it you can close 10 rifts per 1m and 20 rifts per minute spawn.
As long as you do not hit 75 pride by 30% (or have a swelling with 75 pride) the amount of pride you have is a nonissue. Also the titan buff is nice if you can manage to stack for it, but isn't necessary for efficient kills.

With 3 healers you can afford to not dispell as much since you have the extra cushion of healing.
Don't dps the sha reflections. Have the tank not on the boss come pick them up and then tanks can cleave them down together. More veng/next to no damage on tanks, more dps on boss.

Everyone should be closing rifts as they can, but don't run super far to close them as to range healers, especially during banishment/reflection timers.

Assuming your lusting @ 30% you will only have 1-2 Swelling Prides and Sha just plummets, if you have 10/10 alive going into p2 + lust its almost impossible to wipe.... Not really enough healing required to warrant 3 heals honestly unless your healers are undergeared. An extra DPS really speeds up the fight especially with the stacking pride aspect. As far as the OP was wondering, we just dispell on CD regardless if the healer has Titan buff or not. Obviously if the healer has pride he should definitely be dispelling but even if he doesn't have pride he should still just dispell or you will quickly get over run. Costs much less mana to just dispell then to heal through the debuff, and the only downside is +5 pride everytime. As long as your DPS aren't horrendous your healers shouldn't go above 75 pride before the 30% reset anyways.

Use 2 heals. First minute of the fight dispel the debuff only with the healer who has gift of titans. After 60-75 sec both healers start dispelling on CD!. Will make progress sooo much easier. I had 80-85 pride sometimes when we transitioned (hpala) wasnt even close to a problem. The 50-74 pride ability is way easier than anything. Dont worry. Dispel away.

Also. Dodge the shadowbolts from the unsoaked rifts. Handle it a bit lika animafont hc or erupting pustules

Having 3 healed the fight on my first kill and 2 healed it the next week I can honestly say 2 healing is the way to go 100%, much much cleaner kill and overall smoother fight (switched to 2 healing after a bunch of wipes trying for a repeat 3 heal kill).

As for the rifts the goal isn't to close them all but to close the ones closest to the raid, we have healers/dps in the normal position behind the boss (but slightly spread for obvious reasons) and they take all the rifts roughly up to the 2 prisons closest to Norushen, both tanks are then taking any rifts they can around where Norushen is while facing the boss towards their prison so they can unlock it asap during imprison.

There will be rifts you can't close and they'll build up by the end of the fight, the idea is you leave the ones furthest away from the raid to make avoiding the bolts easier due to travel time.

Also assign your best AoE tank to picking up the reflection adds and cleaving them down and just let the dps tunnel boss/kill the large add at the back.

For Heroic progression, you take as few healers as possible without introducing too much RNG or a mathematical impossibility into the fight. Some fights will be made easier as long as you have sufficient DPS to kill something in a set amount of time (e.g Lei Shen Heroic if you can push the pylons without levelling with 3 healers, it makes the chance of getting ball lightning deaths zero and can make P3 easier depending on whether your healers can do any DPS as well but still have healing CDs for Thunderstruck/ ball lightning...), but with Sha Heroic, assuming you have CDs for each Swelling Pride, the only way someone can die is a major execution flaw (e.g ignoring too many rifts, not breaking people out of Banishment quickly, not freeing people from prisons) or having poor healers.

If you are having loads of deaths and your healers aren't up to 2 healing but you have the DPS to manage it anyway, then you could always drop to 5 DPS later on, but for a fight like Sha with a rapid difficulty increase with the extra Pride abilities the longer the fight goes on, the tougher it gets.

We occasionally 3 heal a fight, but not unless it's a must or near must (Iron Juggernaut HC and later this week for Thok HC) or to gear up an additional healer (e.g this week we 3 healed Norushen as one of our healers is 520ilvl :P, we still beat the enrage by ages because our DPS are all 560+ so it's still dropping more quickly with 5 DPS than it was on our progression kill with 6).

For progression - work out how few healers you can viably manage with, without introducing too much RNG with range or lack of healing CDs (though so many non healer classes have raid utility nowadays shouldn't be an issue), then kill the boss.

Anyway, slightly off topic I guess. But 2 heal Sha of Pride for an easy time sub 30%

I'm wondering if anyone has any input on the amount of Swelling Pride casts throughout the course of the fight, assuming it is a first kill. Looking at logs it appears that there are 7 Swelling Prides total, with about 5/6 before the 30% phase and 1/2 in the burn phase.

Also, if someone is above 75 pride before a Swelling Pride, is it more beneficial to have them stay out of an AMZ or Smoke Bomb and use personals or just stay stacked and eat the damage. Thanks!